UClip - The cross device clipboard!

A simple CLI utility tool to copy data across devices, over the internet!

Installation

UClip runs as a bash shell script & uses cl1p.net online clipboard.

• Download the script file and place it on the system PATH
  • You can clone this repo (git clone https://github.com/the-codinator/uclip.git) and symlink the script file to some place on the PATH (ln -s <path-to-repo>/uclip /usr/local/bin/uclip). This allows you to easily update the script by just running git pull
  • Alternatively, you can direct download the file and place it on the system PATH: curl "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/the-codinator/uclip/master/uclip" -o /usr/local/bin/uclip
• Make the actual file executable (chmod +x <path-to-uclip-file>)
• We're good to go! Checkout usage help by running uclip help

Available sub-commands:

• init: Set up your clipboard id & optionally your encryption key
  • The 'UClip ID' must be URL compatible. It is the unique ID at which your clipboard will be hosted online
  • The 'Encryption Key' is used in the AES 256 crypto algorithm to protect others from reading your data
• reset: Clear your stored clipboard id & encryption key
• write: Write data from STD-IN to the online clipboard
  • Useful with the pipe operator to copy the output from a command
  • You can paste text directly into the terminal and terminate the input using 'Ctrl + D' (EOF in most shells)
• push: Publish text currently on your local clipboard to the online clipboard (i.e. copy from local clipboard and paste to online clipboard)
  • Warning: Implemented only for Mac-OS as of now (uses pbcopy)
• read: Read data from the online clipboard and output it to STD-OUT
  • Useful to pipe it to another command, or redirect output to a file, or copy to local clipboard using clip/xclip/pbcopy
  • Note: reading clears the online clipboard
• pull: Populate text currently on the online clipboard to your local clipboard (i.e. copy from online clipboard and paste to local clipboard)
  • Warning: Implemented only for Mac-OS as of now (uses pbpaste)
• version: Print version

Working on Windows / Linux

I initially build this on my Mac, which has default tools to interact with the clipboard. Everything works fine on Windows (via Git Bash / WSL) and Linux, except the local clipboard interactions (pbcopy & pbpaste). While I've only done some basic testing, here's how I made this work for me on other Operating Systems:

• Setup pbcopy/pbpaste on Windows for Git Bash & WSL
• Setup pbcopy/pbpaste on Linux

Requirements & Dependencies

• An internet connection!
• Shell (something that can run bash scripts) (sorry, windows won't directly work with CMD... you can use it via git-bash though!)

This tools runs in the 'bash' environment and requires the following CLI commands for its proper functioning (generally, these are available in various shells by default):

• curl: To access the online clipboard
• base64: For encoding text (to deal with special characters)
• openssl: For encrypting data stored on the online clipboard (not used if encryption key is not set)
• pbcopy/pbpaste: For interacting with the local clipboard on Mac-OS

Disclaimer

This tool uses the free online clipboard service at https://cl1p.net. This tool is not affiliated to it in any way. This tool uses the online service to power its capabilities. The functionality of this tool is provided 'as-is' and without any warranty. Authors & copyright holders are not liable for anything. The code for this tool is available for use under the MIT license.

Contributing

• Feel free to make pull requests
• Alternatives to this tool are also welcome
• For any issues, please provide re-pro steps (and commit on which the issue is occurring)

Support

I did this for fun, and it cost me just a few hours, so I don't need anything from anyone for using this. Instead, it would be awesome if you can support the guys at cl1p.net since we are using their service. You can create a free account here (no email required!), which allows you to see your clip history, store clips longer, and view access logs, and add password protection. You can support the service by purchasing a premium (dedicated) URL for as little as $5 a year! The premium features allow you to create dedicated urls, restore previous settings, even longer retention, and more... Help keep the service alive!

FAQ & Cool Tips

How should I choose an ID ?

Since this ID needs to be globally unique, please choose something that is somewhat complex to avoid collisions with other users. Beyond that, any alphanumeric word with hyphens & underscores is fine.

Is the Encryption Key a password ? How safe is it to copy sensitive data ?

Kind of. Since the online clipboard is a public / 3rd party service, I added the feature to automatically encrypt your copied data using a user-provided encryption key. If the encryption key is not provided, then a simple Base64 encoding is done (more to deal with special characters in the input). The key is treated as symmetric and used by openssl to encrypt / decrypt content using the AES-256-CBC cryptographic algorithm.

That said, the encryption system is a pretty basic one, and I would strongly discourage pushing stuff like credit card info, etc. Use at your own risk.

I keep getting an error while trying to push: "Data already exists on clipboard. Read it before writing again."

This could be for 2 reasons:

• You are trying to write to the online clipboard before you have read it. The online clipboard allows you to store exactly 1 text snippet. To avoid losing data, you cannot write new content until the previous content has been read.
• You are using a very common ID, hence data is getting mixed up between you and some other user. Set up again with a different ID. (uclip reset & uclip init)

I'm trying to read the copied data multiple times / from multiple devices, and I get "No content on clipboard."

Due to limitations of the free online service, the content on the online clipboard is available for reading exactly once. To read multiple times, simple read it once, and write the same content back. Repeat as many times as needed. I'll look to add better support for this kind of use case in the future.

I want to use a temporary ID and share text with a colleague

At times, you may want to copy text to someone else's device (sharing content), but not want to share your clipboard ID & Key. You can temporarily override the ID & Key using the environment variables UCLIP_ID & UCLIP_KEY. As with the default encryption key, UCLIP_KEY is optional. To stop overriding, reset UCLIP_ID to an empty string or reset your shell session.